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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kurotowa" data-source="post: 9802879" data-attributes="member: 27957">There's a key phrase here. "Don't eat your seed corn." It means you have to plan ahead for a sustainable cycle of plantings, not just gorge yourself and leave nothing to plant for next year's harvest. When superhero comic books turned to the direct market and focused on the existing readers, they ate their seed corn. The short term profits were great, but in the long term they cut off the flow of new readers coming in. So now comic book readership is at a dreadful low, even in this age of superhero boom.WotC recognizes that the physical game stores are their seed corn. D&D is not a solo hobby, it needs a community, and the game stores are the main touchstone of local community building. Game stores are where new players or clueless parents of would-be new players go to get their first books, with a little help from store employees who know what to point them at. They're the intake valve feeding new people into the hobby. And so WotC goes to great lengths to keep the game stores solvent.Changing things on the back end so that Amazon isn't undercutting the game stores was one step. The early release window and exclusive covers are another. And not massively undercutting the game stores with digital releases is a third. Could WotC make a lot of players happy and some good short term profits if they marked down digital releases to an equal profit margin? Sure, but in the long term it'd kill the game stores, and that's eating the seed corn. They need the game stores to keep D&D healthy, so the game stores are protected.</blockquote>

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